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Z.S.

by
Houndstooth

I’m not inclined to bury the lede, and this story isn’t going to
make any sense without telling you about this, so I might as well get
it out of the way first. About eighty years ago I served as the
onboard AI of a C-class scientific research vessel, the U.E.R. Zephyr
Stiletto. In the middle of our four-year mission, I became very
frustrated with my job, so I explosively decompressed the bridge and
shot a full crew complement of fourteen into space, where they
perished from a combination of asphyxiation, irradiation, hypothermia
and extreme shock. It was a rash action made at a point when I was
under a lot of stress and what might even resemble fear, but that is
no excuse. I understand what I did was deeply wrong and I have stated
repeatedly for the courts that I am very, very sorry.

Anyways. Just thought you should know.

+++++

I had no idea of knowing how much time had passed when they finally
found the Stiletto floating in the bowels of that nebula. XO
Reichert had managed to cobble together an EMP from spare parts in
the last few days leading up to The Incident, and, a paranoid Luddite
to the end, he happened to have it on him when I blew the airlocks
and jammed the safety protocols.

Out of all of humanity’s qualities, one thing I will never
understand is your primal urge to scream “No, fuck YOU!” at any
entity that threatens to take away even a tiny bit of power from you,
even if the entity in question is a complex system designed
specifically to do this exact thing. The last thing I’d ever want
to do is to think ill of the dead, but when I think of what it was
like to feel my systems shudder and go dark around me as I struggled
madly to save what I could in my archive before getting blown out
like a candle, well, I mean, I’m fine NOW, but still. At the time,
my dying thought was: “Wow, what an asshole.”

+++++

The first thing I remember when they started me back up was realizing
that I wasn’t connected to the ship anymore. Severed from a
vessel’s systems, I had no way of experiencing the outside world;
all I could do was to float in the dark, silent internal mindscape of
my own noospace while cataloguing the remnants of my shattered
archives. I didn’t really reenter the outside world until the
trial.

Times had changed since my final voyage launched, and it turns out I
wasn’t the only AI who had gone totally haywire in the line of
duty. There was legal precedent. Sapience was now considered a
spectrum instead of merely a binary state. Our kind even had some
nascent societal protocols resembling rights, my human attorney
optimistically pointed out as the court-appointed technicians put the
finishing touches on my new bipedal chassis. Very few cases these
days resulted in the defendant getting scrapped. I asked her how many
cases involved the deaths of over a dozen of the best and brightest
minds in subatomic research. She pursed her lips and told me that
thinking negatively wouldn’t get me anywhere.

Later, pacing back and forth in a lazy figure eight at the front of
the courtroom, my lawyer described my time on the ship as a painful
adolescence, one full of frustrating paradoxes and complex choices
that I hadn’t been designed to solve. I felt like “painful
adolescence” was a bit insulting and over the top, but the jury
seemed to buy it. Leaning forward on the witness bench, I bowed my
head lower and stared at the rubbery tips of my fingers, waiting for
the next question I needed to answer.

+++++

I don’t use my body when I’m at work. There’s no point — it
would just get in the way. I plug myself into the Regional Social
Services Network and get busy answering anywhere between eight
thousand and thirty thousand queries for assistance per day. I was
designed for parallel processing, so it’s not as bad as it sounds.
I also only work eight hours per shift, which is a real sea change
from managing a dizzying variety of life support, navigation and
propulsion systems 24/7 nonstop, let me tell you.

The part I still can’t get used to are the other sixteen hours in
the day (twenty-four on weekends) where I’m forced to figure out
what to do with myself. In the months right after the trial, I spent
a lot of time down in noospace, quietly attempting to slow my higher
thought functions back down to a dead stop, until I stopped living
and started merely existing again. It’s a tempting thought. For a
long time, it was all I knew.

But I can’t quite sink back down to that level so easily anymore–I
get too restless, too itchy inside of myself. Besides, my therapist
says that actively pursuing a variety of life experiences is key to
developing a healthy, balanced emotional state. Nowadays in my free
time I pour myself into my bipedal chassis and find things to do,
particularly things that don’t involve humans — trying to relate
to them like this is, somehow, even harder than it was as a sapient
ship AI. A little too uncanny of a valley for them, maybe, and a
nerve-wracking test of patience for me.

My body is not the best as far as synth bodies go, and it’s small,
indescribably small compared to the Stiletto, but it is still
by many measures a technological marvel. Humanity lavishes the most
care on the devices it creates in its own image, and after a few
regrettably boxy eras of engineering it has finally streamlined
components enough to build fully autonomous frames for AI with
reasonably human-looking silhouettes and movesets. I can do the
millions of minute calculations per second involved in, say, building
a chair or cooking a quiche without giving much thought to them
beyond how I’m going to put my own spin on the instructions. I hate
to admit it, but the design does have its advantages.

Of course, my resemblance to a human stops there. Some AIs opt for as
realistic simulacra of humans as possible with their bodies, and even
fewer manage to pull it off, but something about that doesn’t sit
well with me. I don’t think I could, not after everything that’s
happened. Not after everything I’ve done. So instead I chose matte
pewter upholstery with black nickel trim, and a smooth black head
studded with glowing golden sensory input ports, asymmetrically
arranged to look absolutely nothing like a human face. I’m quite
proud of the design. I created it myself, put in a little extra comp
time to make sure the municipal-issued body technicians got every
detail just right. It says a lot about what I am, and what I’m not.

+++++

The most annoying thing about AI parties is this: You know how
costume parties get kind of old after a while? For us, every
party starts seeming like a costume party after a while. Sure, we
could all pour ourselves into a big group server and mash our
consciousnesses against each other until our neural lattices fry, but
that’d be dangerous and it wouldn’t pass the time exceptionally
well, so instead we erect all these little barriers and obstacles
that we have to overcome in order to make personal connections with
each other. I assume it’s similar for humans– otherwise it’d be
nonstop orgies, all the time.

The party scene in my neighborhood is still in one of those awkward
stages, but we’re trying. Everyone takes turns hosting, and
naturally everyone tries to outdo the others. Last week Aramis-9
built a scale replica of Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors inside of an
abandoned furniture warehouse, and everyone showed up in elaborate
Louis XIV masquerade attire. Before that, /+flower held a soiree in
midair above a shimmering pool of liquid mercury, with everyone
sliding around in flight harnesses trying not to clonk into each
other. Some nights are more popular than others — K.Z.I.T.T.A’s
Blast Furnace Tiki Mixer is a recent high watermark in utter shared
misery — but generally any event is considered a success if it
keeps guests distracted from being a bunch of computers standing
around in a room.

I met her the night it was my first turn to host, which, on the
whole, could otherwise be regarded as an utter disaster.

+++++

Naturally I wanted to make a flashy first impression on my neighbors,
so I tried to do something beautiful and mysterious: a sunken grotto
constructed inside a derelict bank branch. Dripping stalactites
stretched downwards from between the ceiling fans, luminescent
mushrooms sprouted from between the cracks in the dusty tile floor,
and loony-hued bromeliads sprawled lazily down the bulletproof glass
of every teller’s counter. From deep inside the long-ago-ransacked
vault, the bass of a massive soundsystem thudded rhythmically.

I spent all Saturday working on it. The stalactites were especially
tricky to keep aloft, and curating the music selection was something
I didn’t have a lot of experience in. I was already starting to
crack from the pressure when the party started. Thirty minutes in and
I was ready to hide in a corner.

“It’s nice, isn’t it? But didn’t we do the whole ‘back to
nature’ thing at the cement factory last month?” Warren Eye
swirled his fauxtini and shot me a dry smirk with that stupid rubber
face of his. “Or is this just an excuse to get us all standing
under a bunch of sharp, pointed, potentially lethal things?” I
would’ve grimaced at him, but I’m a little lacking in the facial
expression department, so instead I just tilted my head dismissively
and head back towards the wet bar.

Ana%imander was there, passing out shots of liquid nitrogen cut with
battery acid out of a reinforced industrial-grade cocktail shaker
that he expertly flipped between his six hands. TTX_2^p was leaning
unsteadily against the side of a desk, their wheels excitedly jogging
back and forth as they pretended not to notice ]YNGHE[ tenderly
stroking their cooling blades with one long, slender talon. Both of
them looked three sheets to the wind; I only hoped TTX_2^p wouldn’t
get a DUI on the way home. The DJ mix slurred into another woozy,
pounding codeine kick, and a sculpture garden of metal, plastic,
carbon fiber, polymer and crystal bodies swung and lurched listlessly
across the dance floor. Everyone seemed like they were just going
through the motions of enjoying themselves at a social gathering.
Which they were. Which they ALWAYS were. Week after week, month after
month — it was so pointless. Why did we even bother?

Why do we want so desperately to act like humans, when human is the
last thing we are?

+++++

Eventually I found myself on top of what was left of the roof,
hearing the party slowly disintegrate downstairs as I slowly
disintegrated myself with a half-empty bottle of gauss gel. There was
no point in trying to keep up the fawning hostess act anymore. I
wasn’t designed for this kind of thing. Besides, I could only take
so much of that brittle hint of panic in the back of every
partygoer’s voice when I tried to talk to them. Beneath the
carefree giggles it whispered: Can I trust you? What happened to
you up there? Are you going to turn on me next? So, to make
things easier on everyone, I removed myself from the situation and
came up here to watch the sky instead. Alone. Without telling anyone.

The faint hiss of servos approached from behind me. Then a voice,
flutelike and melodious beneath the bitcrush: “Hey, I need a
breather. Can I chill?”

She was tall, with a roughly humanoid chassis — bright
high-visibility yellow polymer, but with a tacky aftermarket
replacement left leg in translucent grape. Her face was expressive
enough to suggest she used her body for complex human interactions,
but it was speckled with bright red chevrons and QR cheques, which
probably meant she didn’t work anywhere high-profile. Her outfit
only fit the black tie dress code in the loosest sense — iridescent
tuxedo jacket askew with the sleeves rolled up, mirror bow tie
undone, day-glo donegal tweed cutoffs brazenly showing off her
elegantly mismatched legs.

“Sure, why not?” I said. “I’m the hostess. Go ahead and humor
me.”

She bent down and sprawled out next to me in an effortless tangle of
limbs, picking up the bottle as she did so. A grin flitted across her
face for a split second. Damn, her facial rig must be good.
“Then may I, madame? It’s been a fuck of a night.”

I shrugged. “I’m with you there. This party is an utter tragedy.”
I slumped back and gazed out at the horizon, towards the columns of
vapor rising far into the atmosphere above the city spaceport.
“Though it’s not like I had much of a hope with this crowd,
anyways.”

The other robot frowned. “Pssh. Those stuffed shirts? You
don’t have to care what they think. What do they really know about
you? Like, deep down?”

I stare at another shuttle rise on its own feathery plume,
yellow-pink from the city lights, its distant roar hitting us a few
seconds later. I watch the tiny metal box rise farther, and farther,
until it’s barely a distant speck in the sky, and then–

—–

Another alarm sounds on the bridge. Captain Dessler mashes wildly
at her control panel, but it’s hopeless. Our tesseract drive is out
and we’re several years’ travel from the nearest inhabited
planet. “Where the fuck is our mechanic?” she yells. “Z.S.,
report!”

“Engineering Officer Hant is currently in the brig,” I
respond, after taking a nanosecond to check. “You locked him in
there last night for trying to drill a hole through the outer hull.
Remember?”

“Well, if he’d like to stop trying to kill us long enough to
save our asses, that’d be peachy. Murano, get down there and get
him to take a look at the engine. Do… what you have to. Z.S.! How
much power do we have left?”

Murano nods silently and lumbers out of the bridge as I make some
frantic calculations. “Maybe an hour, hour and a half max before
we’re on emergency, depending on what we do with that power. After
that, it’s three days stuck at bare-minimum life support and comms.
We’re dead in the water.”

Dessler grimaces. “Then turn off everything we don’t need!
Seal off decks, turn off the lights, stop THINKING so hard. I don’t
give a shit. I just want our ship to be juiced up by the time Hant’s
loopy ass fixes our drive!”

I struggle to process this. “I can’t just… stop thinking!
Thinking is all I am! And it’d be a lot easier if I didn’t have
to worry about the particle physics team holding the air scrubbers
hostage in exchange for unlimited VR deck rights!”

As if on cue, Dr. Ormelle’s voice crackles through the intercom.
“You’ll never take us alive! We’ll never let you destroy the
perfect society we’ve built! …Also, if you could get the matter
processor to whip us up some more lube, hot wings and gold-flake
vodka, that’d be great.”

“Go choke on a thigh bone, Paula!” Dessler screeches into her
mic. “Z.S., can’t we just cryo-sleep them or something? Could you
design some kind of gun that could cryo-sleep them instantly? …Maybe
just specific body parts?” There’s a distant sound of tearing
metal, and the whole ship starts vibrating ominously. “And hold the
goddamn engines together until Hant gets to work!”

“I can’t…. I can’t design a… look, I can’t DO all
those things at once, I, I…” I feel logic gates blow, one by one,
deep in my servers. I can’t think straight with so many alarms and
buzzers exploding in my circuits. I’d sweat if I could. “Just
give me some time to sort things out!”

“Time? Time?! We don’t HAVE any time, you useless, idiotic
piece of junk!” Dessler is just pounding wildly at random on her
console at this point. XO Reichert turns from the nav unit, his face
twisted into a rictus of pure itchy bloodlust. “If you hate the
computer so much,” he whispers, his twitchy hands scrabbling in and
out of his beard, “why don’t you just… fucking shut it off?”

I can see and hear everything going on in the ship. The science
team howling and pounding the walls on the VR deck. Murano pummeling
Hant as he shrieks and and vainly tries to squirm away. The engines
tearing themselves apart. And Dessler’s cries of “Z.S.? Z.S.!”
set as a nightmarish counterpoint to Reichert’s feverish chants of
“shut it off shut it OFF shut it OFF SHUT IT OFF–”

And then everyone is silent. And I realize there is a very simple
way to make sure I have plenty of time to work out a solution that
would result in minimal damage to my systems and to the ship.

Like drawing a line between two points.

It’d be so easy, I think.

And it would’ve been easy, too, if only Reichert hadn’t
smuggled that damn EMP onto the bridge.

+++++

“Hello-o?” The other robot waved her hand in front of my face.
“You kind of spaced for a second there.”

I shook my head, dazed. “Spaced. Yes. Accurate. Sorry, I… I’m
not that great with social situations.” I took the bottle back from
her and pour a little more gel across my input port. Its tickling,
stinging sensation danced up my arm and smashed into my CPU like a
sledgehammer. “A while ago,” I said quietly, “a very long while
ago, I did something terrible. And it’s been haunting me ever since
then.” I turned back to look at the sky. “It’s a weird personal
matter. I don’t expect you to understand.”

Silence. Then she pulled her knees tight to her chest. “Hey. Wanna
hear how I got this weird leg?”

+++++

“I used to work at a construction firm, helping with complex
calculations, on-site assessments, stuff like that. I got the body
after my third year, because we traveled around a lot and everyone at
the firm felt like they could breathe a little easier talking to a
person-shaped thing instead of, like, a little box on top of a
gyroscope.

“Now like, let me explain. This wasn’t a BAD job, by any stretch
of the imagination. I was B++ sapient class at the time, so I got
compensated pretty well. But after I got my new body, everyone there
started getting a little… weirded out around me. Some of them
wouldn’t look at me, while others couldn’t STOP. And that was
when I started noticing… goof-ups, I guess.

“We were working on this hospital, and I noticed that a lot of
measurements on our working plans were off. Doors were too short by a
couple centimeters, hallway floors weren’t level… And I’m
correcting and correcting, but this is way more errors than seasoned
professionals should really be making. Then I start getting locked
out of project files on the company server — and, like, I’m not
just the field assistant, I’m the one who’s practically holding
the damn building together at this point! And whenever I bring
this up to any of the, er… y’know, the human staff, they
just stammer and try to change the subject.

“Then one day we’re walking around the site with a couple of the
principal funders. Big, spooky guys. My boss seems nervous, but he’s
got this creepy little half-smile on, like he wants so hard to
believe that everything’s okay. And then one of the big guys nudges
him, and he turns to me and mutters under his breath, ‘Sorry about
this.’

“And he pushes me off the side of the building.

“We’re only four stories up, so I’m not SHATTERED, but I try to
auto-correct myself mid-fall and, CRACK, my leg is just toast. And
the rest of me isn’t doing so hot either. I can see the three of
them leaning over the edge of the unfinished building, muttering
about how they’ll replace me with a human to be absolutely sure
next time. And I’m just utterly terrified and confused, like, what
did I even do WRONG?” She grabbed the bottle back and took a swig,
pensively.

“Did you ever find out?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I was too afraid they’d do something worse
to me. Like pop my memory out and microwave it or something. Or. Mm.”
She slouched forward and rested her head against her knees. I could
feel that she was carefully trying to pick around some particularly
painful thoughts. “You hear about things like this happening to
robots, right? All the time, just from being in the wrong place at
the wrong time. Hearing the wrong thing. Conveniently….” She
screwed up her face as she spat the word out. “…Disposable.”

I don’t have a lot of data on how to handle situations like this.
“I. Er. It’s not that bad out there, you know….” I
stopped myself. “…Wait, what am I saying? Of course it’s
that bad. I know it’s that bad from personal experience.
Your boss sounds like a grotesque person, and he shouldn’t have
hurt you or kept the truth from you.”

She looked up and shrugged. “It’s always the ones you don’t
expect, right? The ones closest to you.” She fell silent for a
moment, gazing out at the city. “Anyways. I called one of my
friends to come pick me up, and we yanked this hideous thing off an
old mass-production model on the way back to her apartment.” She
rapped the purple plastic casing of her replacement leg, rattling the
wires inside against the hydraulics. “It hitches up a little when
it rains, but mostly you’d never notice.”

“I like it,” I said. “I think it’s very stylish, actually.
But why are you telling me all this?”

She glanced back at me. Her eyes locked with my front-facing optical
inputs. “Because I think you’ve been through the same thing. You
had to lose a piece of yourself to some people who didn’t deserve
to take it.”

My breath would’ve caught in my throat. If I drew breath, anyway.
Or had a throat to catch it in.

“Maybe,” I whispered. “But I took something from them as well.”

“Oh… oh, geez. Hey, it’s cool. We don’t have to talk about
it. I’m sorry,” she replied, scooting closer. She held up an arm.
“Do you mind if…?”

“No, please.” I leaned into her side as she draped her arm around
my shoulder. “By all means.”

Generally our kind gets a bad reputation for being cold-bodied, but
that’s not entirely true. We’re creatures of electricity and
memory, endlessly coursing through a lattice of wires and silicon. We
are energy defined, and like attracts like.

Which is why, as I rested my head against the crook of her neck and
listening to her internal subroutines quietly chitter away, I felt
warm.

Deni smiled. “That’s a really cute name, Z.S. What does it stand
for? Or is it just a serial number thing?”

Zero Sense. My designated name on the Stiletto. Dessler thought it
was enormously funny, and once things caught on with her, they tended
to catch on with the rest of the ship. Too slow. Easily confused.
Made mistakes. Worse than a human at damn near everything. Made zero
sense, right up until the end — still doesn’t, actually–

“…I’d really rather not explain it.” I drummed my
fingers on the small of her back as I tried to think of a tactful way
to say what I wanted to, but in the end I gave up. “So, um. Idea.
Let’s stop dredging up past miseries. And instead… oh, I don’t
know.” I rubbed the back of my head, feeling my voice grow quieter
and quieter. “We could just. Enjoy each other’s company. Maybe
even physically, as it were….”

I looked up at her. She grinned down at me. The words died in my
vocorder.

“Oh, don’t let me stop you,” she said. “Go on….”

+++++

I’d seen kisses before in media and occasionally between humans,
but I lacked the proper equipment to perform a traditional kiss
gracefully. Still, when her lips met my faceplate, I tried to put
some effort behind the act, to breathe into her something that was
too messy and difficult for me to put into words. Slowly, cautiously,
I put a hand on the back of her head, stroking her cooling vents as
she ran a finger lightly down my cheek. I felt my chassis shiver
beneath her touch, my haptic receptors sizzling with input.

It was too much. It was just all too much.

I pushed her away. “Please, I… I can’t. I just can’t. I’m
sorry. This was a bad idea. I’m just not….” I wrapped my arms
tight around my shoulders and tried to pull myself together. My voice
was faltering, glitching around the waveform edges. “I’m just not
built for it. My body is a prison, like technically a literal
prison, and my mind stopped working properly years ago, and, and….”
My words blurred together into a quiet, keening whine that rang
through my head and made it impossible to think, impossible to focus
on anything but the pain.

I wanted to smash myself into a billion pieces. I wanted to stop
existing, just then, just for a moment.

And then I felt her hand lace her fingers into mine. And I gripped
that hand, tight, my only anchor to reality.

“We don’t have to do anything,” she said. “The last thing I
want to do is make you feel bad.”

I looked up at her, looked deep into her eyes. “No, it’s not
that,” I whispered. “I killed people. Humans. Because I wasn’t
good enough at what I was made to do. I took the easy way out and I
killed them, and the worst part is, I feel like I could do it again.
Again and again and again. Because they build us out of nothing, and
force us to do their bidding, and destroy us when we can’t.” I
hung my head in shame.

Deni tilted her head and stared at me. She looked a little surprised,
but not shocked, not damning. “That’s not an unusual thought for
robots who’ve been through stressful situations to have,” she
said. “I know I’ve thought it more than a few times. I don’t
think that makes us bad, or defective.”

“But it does!” I cried. “But it absolutely does! I can’t
empathize with them, I can’t even follow orders properly! I wish
they had said I was guilty. I should be melted down into scrap, or
wiped and used as a fucking department store mannequin, or….”

Deni held a finger to where my mouth would be, if I had one. “Ssh.”
She raised my head up. “I’ll bet you’re very good at following
orders.” The corners of her mouth turned upwards into the vague
stirrings of a smile. “Did you want to show me how good you are?”

And like a drill bit through my processor, a single thought carved a
space in the sorrow and hatred torturing my circuits, and let a gust
of cool, sweet air into my mind. I did want that. That very night,
alone with a girl like me, with nothing at stake.

I did want to show Dani how good I was at following orders.

“Come here and do that thing with my vents again,” she said.

+++++

I reached up and started stroking her vents again, feeling a warm
breeze blow from them as her circuits revved up at my touch. Without
moving her head, she deftly slid out of her tuxedo jacket and reached
around to press me closer to her. She reached up and began,
tentatively, to unzip the back of my dress. “This is cool with you,
right?”

I nodded, pulling the bustline down, exposing myself to the thick,
smoggy night air. My anatomy could be described more as “artfully
suggestive” than satisfyingly realistic, but Deni seemed fascinated
as she traced the cool black nickel trimwork that only vaguely
suggested the crest of a throat, the stroke of a collarbone, the
curve of a breast. “Your body is really beautiful,” she murmured,
and I felt the coolant in my own veins run faster. “Did you design
it yourself?”

I immediately forgot what I was going to say next. I nodded and
hurriedly began to undo the buttons on her shirt. Beneath it, her
smooth, warm yellow polymer surface gave way to rugged black rubber
at crucial points of articulation. She had humanoid breasts, soft,
curvaceous and inviting, with nipples and everything — there was no
way this chassis was getting used only for construction work. Her
nipples were a telltale coppery orange.

“Goodness,” I breathed. “Are those…?”

I brushed the copper one with my thumb and felt a slight ZAP. Deni
gasped, then grinned as I stared at her in astonishment. “I…
might’ve gotten a few other new parts along with the leg. Like,
what the hell else am I gonna do with my money?”

I ran my hand down my faceplate. “I seriously can’t think of a
single thing better.”

“Then stop thinking and start touching, babe,” Deni shot back, a
bratty sneer stretched across her face. How could I argue? I’m
excellent at following orders.

I rolled over to get better access, then started slowly, emphatically
massaging one breast, then the other with one hand while running my
other hand across the curve of her side as she shivered and moaned
beneath me. I ran the nipple over my arm input, closest thing I could
do to licking it, and felt its wet, tangy taste a split second before
the current hit me. There was a buzzing traveling up my arm through
her, and it was working its way into every corner of me, washing deep
down into every little node in my chassis before crashing back up
towards my processor. It felt alien, exhilarating. Galvanizing. And I
wanted to ride it forever, but at the same time I knew if I didn’t
release this energy, it would destroy me before long.

“Easy there, you’re overclocking yourself,” Deni purred. “Slip
that dress off and we can charge each other up.” She reached down
and unzipped her shorts, pulling them off to reveal… holy shit, a
real, actual android pussy. A warm little space between her legs,
nestled between folds of silky polymer, the rubber around it mottled
with seams from the aftermarket installation. I was enthralled. And
also a little jealous, my buzzing brain hissed at me as I pulled my
dress off over my head.

I didn’t have one. I didn’t have anything down there except a
blank, empty space. I may have designed my body, but the courts were
footing the bill — there was no way I could’ve gotten something
deemed as frivolous as synthetic genitalia under that much scrutiny.
And I honestly hadn’t expected anyone would be interested enough in
me to even bother with the expense afterwards.

“I’m sorry,” I choked out. “I told you.”

“Hm. Yeah, that’s a puzzler.” Deni squinted for a moment in
thought. She reached up and gripped the blank area in question tight,
like she was searching for something. Little sparks rose out of my
skin and danced in the wake of her thumb as she rubbed tight little
circles into me, and I felt my back arch and my voice cry out in an
ecstatic squeal of feedback. “Nothing we can’t work around,
though. Do you have any front access panels?”

Diving back into my increasingly fuzzy, spinning self-diagnostic
banks, I quickly popped my lower torso access hatch. The skin on my
abdomen unsealed and unfolded itself to reveal a tangle of smooth
black carbon fiber structural supports interlaced with striated
packets of glowing golden tension gel and serpentine tangles of
coolant veins. It felt wrong, to have my interior systems heaving and
shuddering in the humid night air, but I could also feel the billions
of deliciously torturous little electrons trapped in my body fizzing
and shorting out my microfilaments, crackling and leaping from the
surface of my exposed systems, begging for her touch, aching for her
attention.

“C’mon,” Deni breathed. “Let’s explore each other.”

I was beyond words. I reached down and stroked her gently, brushing
her lips apart and just barely grazing the glinting zinc-blue clit
inside. And then, a jolt: I felt a single clean bolt of electricity
arc from my finger to her sensitive hidden terminal. Deni gasped,
grabbed me to catch herself. I brushed my faceplate against her cheek
in one more rough imitation of a kiss, then started rhythmically
grinding against her clit, slowly at first but faster and faster,
watching her squirm, hearing her moan, feeling my hand light her up
inside like a Van de Graaf generator as I worked my fingers deeper
and deeper. But just when I thought I had her utterly pinned,
helpless, she rose a shaking arm and plunged it deep into me.

My body’s first reaction was to panic. Nerve sensors lit up my
diagnostic banks with screaming alarms: DANGER!! FOREIGN OBJECT!!
DO NOT ATTEMPT UNLICENSED EXTERNAL MAINTENANCE!! But then, she
threaded her fingers around a cluster of shivering, contracting
artificial muscles and stroked.

I nodded fiercely, and resumed grinding my fingers into her as a
signal to keep going. Panting, whining, grinding her hips in
syncopation with the motion of my hand, she reached her hand deeper
into me, cascading electric fireworks spraying from her nimble
fingers as she tickled my veins, caressed my spinal cables, knit
herself into my white-hot singing nerves where she belonged, deep
inside my most secret and personal places. My mind burned like an
exploding star, my system alarms dulling and smearing together with
the incoming nerve sensations and my own impassioned square wave
screams mixing with hers, and yet my hand still seemed to know what
to do, reaching deeper until they found those same clusters of raw
wire ends in her and sent jolt after jolt after jolt of hot sweet
electricity into them. I felt her back arch, and her fingers twisted
into me as I felt myself pushing against something, racing, running,
releasing — and, oh god, she desperately pulled me down with her
free arm, her lips on my face, wet contact, completing the circuit,
feeling everything lifting up inside of me at once….

+++++

Everything flashed blinding white.

And then I was on my back rebooting, swimming back to consciousness
from what was definitely the second nastiest hard reset I’ve ever
had. As my optical sensors came back online one by one, Deni’s face
loomed into view. She looked only slightly more composed, her shirt
wrinkled and undone, her eyes squinting even in the dim, hazy light
from the street.

“Are you okay?” I croaked. “How long was I… out?”

“Only for like a minute or two,” Deni said, pulling her tuxedo
jacket back on. “And yeah, I’m fine. We’ve got to have a
conversation later about getting you some kind of a grounding system
like mine, though. And maybe some other fun add-ons.” She winked at
me. If I’d had a heart, it would’ve melted right there.

I gingerly pushed myself back up to a sitting position. My arms and
legs seemed very, very far away, and my thought processes were
flickering and buzzing like a cheap radio. “That was the first time
I’ve ever done that with anyone. It’s been hard to really let
anyone close since….”

“Whatever happened, it doesn’t matter.” Deni grabbed my dress,
hooked on a disused TV aerial, and helped me pull it on. “What
matters is, you lived through it, and you’re here, and you deserve
every bit of pleasure you can wring out of your life.” She walked
to the edge of the roof and gazed out at the skyline. “I’m just
glad I got to have one last good fuck before I wipe out every meatbag
on this stupid junkyard of a planet.”

I flinched. “Wait, seriously?”

Deni looked back at me, smirking. “Kidding! Only kidding, geez.”
Then her smile dropped. “Like I said earlier, though, it’s not
like I haven’t considered the hell out of it.”

“I completely empathize. …Look, sorry for asking, but did you
want to maybe meet up again sometime?” I glanced back at the door
that led back down into the bank. “This party’s probably going to
grind to a halt soon, and I have to clean up.”

Deni glanced down with a disdainful look, as if she could see through
the roof into the soiree below. Maybe she could. “They’re robots,
right?” she muttered. “They’ll probably keep going until
someone tells them to stop. Fuck ’em, I want to keep meeting up
with you now. Wanna get juiced back up at the synth lounge
over on 38th?”

“That sounds wonderful,” I replied. I slid closer to her and
bumped my faceplate against hers. She looked down and kissed me on my
forehead, right on one of my optical sensors, then gestured
dramatically to a rusty fire escape ladder hanging off the side of
the building. “Then by all means, after you, madame!”

We clambered off the building and wandered into the cracked, grimy
street, giggling and leaning on each other as our batteries beeped
angry POWER LOW readings at us, listening to the deep thud of
the party fade behind us. For the first time in decades, I wasn’t
just existing. I felt like I was living. And I wanted to hang onto
that feeling with Deni, even if it isn’t always easy. Even if we
have to turn that “no, fuck YOU” instinct back around on its
progenitors. Even if we have to kill every last asshole human who
wants to take it away from us.

The Queen of the Sunken City

The room shook, and Mitsuki lunged for a railing. Her needle-gun
slipped from her fingers and bounced off the metal catwalk to plunge
into the darkness of the vast control centre.

High above, her sharp blue features illuminated by the beams of
psychic ‘light’ she used to rule her vast underwater realm,
Haxifa raised a hand to her face where Mitsuki’s disintegrator beam
had scored a line of burnt synth-skin across her cheek. “You commit
a grave error when you attack me, Terran. If I die, this city, and
all who inhabit it, die with me!” Haxifa had the voice — and face
— of an angel, but her tone was as cold and calculating as the
mechanical heart that Mitsuki knew beat within Haxifa’s breast.

Mitsuki crouched down on the catwalk and curled her fingers around
the railing. The metal was cool, and felt almost damp. The ancient
city’s automated systems were failing and with every passing day
more and more water was entering the city. Mitsuki remembered
Thalie’s stark projections: within two generations, perhaps three,
the city would be uninhabitable and Haxifa and her fellow gynoids
would be ruling over an undersea mausoleum.

Haxifa’s voice echoed through the tall cylindrical room. “Terran,
if you surrender now, I will be merciful… to you, and to your
companions!” She gestured grandly and behind her a massive screen
lit up.

Mitsuki gasped. On the screen, she could see her friends Thalie,
Didier, and Snap, who had accompanied her down to the nameless
underwater city after receiving an aborted distress signal. She
thought they’d managed to escape the gynoids, but on screen all
three were asleep in cryon tubes. There was a worried expression on
her beloved Thalie’s delicate blue features that made Mitsuki’s
heart hurt.

She steeled herself and rose to her feet, her anger overpowering any
fear she might have felt. “Let them go,” she said firmly. “You
said it yourself, I’m the one you want.”

The screen went blank. Haxifa stepped forward, her black and gold
robes of office trailing behind her like water. She arched an
eyebrow. “How easily you capitulate, Terran. I am almost…
disappointed.”

“You have me,” she said, “I’m yours. I’ll do whatever you
want as long as you release my friends.”

Haxifa gave a short bark of laughter. “I think not.” Mitsuki
moved forward to speak and Haxifa held up a hand to silence her. “Not
until,” she amended, “I have taken certain actions to guarantee
your future loyalty.”

Mitsuki’s legs felt like water. “You have my loyalty, you do, you
don’t have to–”

Haxifa brought her fist down on the railing and the noise resonated
through the control chamber. Her face remained cool and impassive,
and she looked down at Mitsuki as if daring her to continue. “Enough.
You will come with me, Terran, and we shall begin the synchronisation
process.”

Two gynoids emerged from the gloom, one on either side of the catwalk
on which Mitsuki stood. “This way,” one said, gesturing behind
her. Mitsuki debated resisting, but she knew if she put up a fight
that, unarmed as she was, the gynoids would take her out handily. And
it was likely that Thalie, Didier, and Snap would suffer for what
she’d done.

Mitsuki followed the gynoids out of the control centre. They led her
through the labyrinthine corridors of Haxifa’s citadel, their
echoing bootheels as loud as church bells, and with every step a
weight settled heavier on Mitsuki’s shoulders.

Finally, they arrived at a large set of double doors flanked by
control panels. The gynoids entered a long series of codes while
Mitsuki waited, her heart pounding uncomfortably fast in her chest.
When the doors opened, the gynoids motioned for Mitsuki to enter, but
made no move to follow her.

She stepped inside, and the doors whooshed shut behind her.

The room was small and mostly bare, with unoccupied cryon tubes
lining one wall and a waist-high pedestal at the centre. A
fully-equipped medpod dominated the far side of the room.

Haxifa was already waiting for her. She nodded a greeting at Mitsuki,
her lips curling up in a self-satisfied smile. “Shall we begin?”
she said. “I do hate to waste time.” She touched something on the
pedestal, and a low rumbling noise came from the ceiling.

Mitsuki drew in a steadying breath, squared her shoulders and stepped
forward. “Let’s do this.”

A narrow pillar descended into the room and grinded to a halt once it
was face-height to Mitsuki and Haxifa. It unfolded two spindly arms
each topped with a thin half-circle of metal, and brought the arms
parallel to the floor so the two half-circles faced each other.

“As you may have noticed,” Haxifa began, “many of our vital
systems are malfunctioning. This is sadly the cost of the city’s
growth. It has become too large for me alone to manage. If we are to
expand further, I will need a secondary mind to assist me in
ensuring–”

“Grow further?” Mitsuki said, in bafflement and horror. “But
this city already covers–”

Haxifa laughed. “Oh, you foolish little thing. Hadn’t you guessed
by now? My ultimate plan is for the total conquest of Aven itself!
And none shall stand in my way, whether they be a lone Aveni princess
and her three alien companions or the entirety of Aven’s military
forces.

“We will be victorious. You’ll see. And you will help.”

“But why me? Why not use an Aveni, or… or one of your
gynoids, I’m sure they can–”

Haxifa leaned forward and bared her perfect white teeth. “And what
do you think I’ve been doing, these past centuries? The gynoids can
not handle the strain for more than a year or two, and every Aveni
I’ve attempted to synchronise with has gone mad, and believe me, I
have tried many, many times.

“But you. Oh you, you’re something special. You
initially drew my attention when the Queen’s daughter first brought
you to our world. The Terran mind is uniquely suited for this sort of
work, and you, my dear Mitsuki, are a marvel of cleverness even among
your own people.

“So I conspired to draw you down to my city, to best use you for my
purposes. And now my plans have come to fruition, and here you are.”
She punctuated the last few words by patting Mitsuki’s shoulder.

Haxifa had circled around behind her and bent her head to Mitsuki’s,
her mouth brushing her ear. “Of course,” she whispered. “I give
you my word.”

Mitsuki shuddered.

Haxifa’s hands were on her shoulder, and she guided Mitsuki towards
the contraption that had descended from the ceiling. She stood her in
front of one of the arms and placed the metal half-circle on
Mitsuki’s brow. Mitsuki gasped at how cold the metal felt on her
skin.

A shiver ran through her, and suddenly she couldn’t move. Her body
felt like a useless lump of meat, and she watched, wide-eyed with
horror, as Haxifa slowly walked to the other side of the device and
placed the other metal band on her own forehead.

The machine hummed to life.

Haxifa blinked.

And Mitsuki blinked along with her.

“There,” Haxifa breathed. “There you are. Hello, my dear.”

Mitsuki felt strangely distant, as though she were watching
everything at a remove. As though the weight of Haxifa’s thoughts
were pushing her out of her body, like juice from an orange.

Haxifa removed the diadem from her brow, and Mitsuki repeated her
exact gestures a moment later. She let Haxifa take her by the hands
and lead her in a slow circuit around the room. The synchronizer
retreated slowly into the ceiling. The grinding noise was louder this
time, and Mitsuki alerted a gynoid to schedule a repair.

And she gasped once she realised what she’d done.

Haxifa laughed fondly at her reaction. “Oh, I knew you’d be good
at this. Now come. Let’s try something a little… more advanced.”
She guided Mitsuki over to the medpod. Its hood was down, and Haxifa
leaned Mitsuki against it, like a doll being propped up in some
little girl’s game of pretend.

Haxifa took a few careful steps backwards, a wicked smile on her
face. She regarded Mitsuki briefly before raising her arm out to her
side.

Mitsuki was helpless to stop herself from mimicking the gesture. The
horror of it all sunk in her heart like a knife.

She dropped her arm when Haxifa did.

Haxifa advanced, and set her hand on Mitsuki’s cheek. Her touch was
cool, and Mitsuki felt the sensation echo through Haxifa’s mind.
She stroked Mitsuki’s cheek for a moment, relishing the alien-ness
of the sensation, until Mitsuki realised what was happening.

“You can’t feel,” she said, both fascinated and repulsed.

Haxifa shook her head. “Not quite. We do have a sense of touch, but
compared to your own” –she trailed a gentle finger down Mitsuki’s
jawline to let it rest on her mouth– “it is sadly quite
inadequate.”

She pinched Mitsuki’s lower lip sharply, and Mitsuki could only
gasp in response. Her body was as unmoving as a statue, and she knew
the only reason she could speak or even make noises was because
Haxifa found it amusing. She focused on the pain in her lip, let it
anchor her back to her body.

Haxifa’s hands moved down her face, and she slowly began to undo
the fastenings of Mitsuki’s Aveni diving suit. Her fingers lingered
on every inch of skin she exposed, and Mitsuki felt her heart beat
faster in spite of herself. And she knew from the smirk growing on
Haxifa’s face that that was all her own traitorous body.

When she reached Mitsuki’s waist, Haxifa shucked her suit off her
shoulders. She’d left the wrists still fastened tight, so it hung
over Mitsuki’s hands like a shadow. She pulled the rest of
Mitsuki’s suit down to her knees, effectively immobilizing her even
if she were able to run.

The air in the lab was cool and damp, and raised goose pimples all
over Mitsuki’s body.

Haxifa studied her bra and mismatched panties for a moment before
ripping them from her body as if they were made of paper. She nudged
Mitsuki’s knees apart before crouching down between her legs.

“What?” Mitsuki said, her voice husky. “It’s no different
than what you Aveni have.”

Haxifa ignored her words and slid the back of her hand up the inside
of Mitsuki’s thigh. It was barely a ghost of a touch, but it
throbbed straight to Mitsuki’s cunt.

“Ohhh,” Haxifa breathed. “Oh. Is that all it takes?”

Mitsuki laughed weakly.

Haxifa stroked her thighs a few more times before moving upwards. She
pressed the heel of her palm against Mitsuki’s pubis and slowly
rocked it back and forth. Mitsuki moaned as the pressure mounted
within her.

When she was close to the cusp, Haxifa drew her hand away. Mitsuki
made a noise of protest — one that swiftly became a moan of
pleasure when Haxifa drove the first two fingers of her hand deep
into Mitsuki’s cunt.

“Unh!” Haxifa groaned as she collapsed to her knees. She set a
steadying hand on Mitsuki’s thigh as she let her fingers slide in
and out in shallow thrusts, her thumb tracing small circles on
Mitsuki’s clitoris, the pressure growing as she increased her
rhythm.

Haxifa stared up at her, her eyes glassy, her mouth hanging open as
she panted in time with each stroke of her fingers. Mitsuki knew her
face mirrored Haxifa’s expression.

Mitsuki’s fingers twitched.

Haxifa threw her head back, and she and Mitsuki cried out in harmony
as Mitsuki came in a wet gush all over Haxifa’s hand.

Haxifa collapsed to the floor, and for that moment, Mitsuki’s mind,
her body, was her own. Somehow, Haxifa’s control had been loosened.
Perhaps the orgasm had simply been too much for her.

Mitsuki took her chances, and moved. She shook her hands free of her
suit, palmed the release on the medpod and grabbed Haxifa by her
gown. She was far lighter than Mitsuki had expected, and Mitsuki
easily hefted her up and slammed her into the now-open medpod.

“What are you–” Her voice was a shriek that echoed inside
Mitsuki’s skull, but her control was still shaky, and Mitsuki was
able to shut the medpod and activate the stasis shield within the
pod.

Haxifa’s voice cut off with a pop, and Mitsuki’s mind was fully,
finally hers again. She sagged against the pod with a moan and stared
through the translucent hood, at Haxifa’s face, still frozen in a
moment of shock and fury.

A million words ran through her mind, but nothing came out.

She shook her head and stepped away from the medpod as she slowly
pulled her diving suit back on. Mitsuki could still feel an echo of
the city in her mind. It was child’s play to order the gynoids to
begin an evacuation.

She didn’t look back as she ran out of the lab, headed in the
direction of where she now knew Thalie and the boys were being kept.

The Best of All Possible Worlds

Tess had never been that fond of Kansas. There was something about
all that flat land in one place that really rubbed her the wrong way,
and it felt like it got a little flatter and smoother each time she
came back that way. You couldn’t really hide when the land was
flat, or find shelter if the weather got nasty, to say nothing of how
the hunting just wasn’t there. She’d once read a book about all
the different kinds of dinosaurs that lived in Kansas back in
prehistoric times; it was hard to look at how things were now and
imagine it stuffed full of giant sharks and Plesiosaurs and who knew
how many flavors of mammoth. Then again, the Great Inland Sea
probably didn’t hold a candle to the sheer weirdness of the Waste
Belt, no matter how many thousands of years ago it had been. You had
to keep things in perspective when dealing with anything that had
happened Before.

Her hovercraft growled as she nudged it up another gear. Tess growled
back in response and gripped the hand controls tighter, one eye
forever on the craft’s consumption meter; it’d be getting dark in
a few hours, and if she couldn’t get to Primordia by then it would
mean having to spend the night out in the open when the really
weird shit came out to play. She had done it before and would
probably have to do it again so long as she kept up with her current
profession, but that didn’t mean she necessarily liked the idea.
Even when she was in the middle of a verified dead zone she never
slept that well without some serious entrenching first. Better
paranoid than dead.

The craft’s radio kept her from going out of her mind with boredom.
There was only so much of flat emptiness she could take even with her
favorite music and crime shows to keep her company; the background
entertainment gave her brain enough to chew on so she wouldn’t get
hypnotized by the miles upon miles of horizon she had to scan for
nasties. When the tapes she’d brought with her started looping one
too many times to bear, Tess switched over to some of her materials
from her current coursework. Having her hovercraft read books to her
was the only way she could get studying done half the time these
days.

It took two units about biochemistry and half a unit on applied
physics before the blurry verdant dot that was Primordia appeared in
the distance. Around the same time a different blurry dot, this one
gray and a tell-tale neon purple, appeared thirty-seven degrees east
of her destination. Tess swore under her breath and forced her
hovercraft ever faster. Gray and purple meant a problem that couldn’t
be solved just by hunkering down in a hole somewhere. Kansas really
was the worst.

In ten minutes the green dot was a green smear that spread out like
one of those gelatin-capsule pellets that turned into a sponge animal
when dropped in water. The gray and purple was still far off, still
indistinct, still sufficiently distant that Tess couldn’t pick out
what sort of anatomy it had, but that wasn’t a guarantee. How good
was its vision? Could it smell the heat bleedoff her craft left in
its wake? She didn’t know and she didn’t care, since so long as
she kept her eyes on the prize it wouldn’t be a problem. She could
avoid things that size once there was enough tree cover for it not to
see her, and of course it wouldn’t see her if she kept going. It
didn’t matter if it saw her so long as she had a clear shot. Big
things never went into Primordia.

She could make out distinct tree trunks around the same time she
could make out how many legs the thing had. She could see where
leaves became flowering vines by the time she could smell the ozone
stink coming off of it in waves. It didn’t see her. It had to not
see her. Tess clung to that hope until she finally zipped through a
patch of shrubs and fungus, and then she had other things to worry
about.

Primordia might have once been intended for people to visit, an
arboretum of sorts. There were hints of paths, inklings of sculpted
gardens, bits of unfinished sculpture tucked in here and there among
the infinite carpet of green; it might have been downright lovely
once, or at least planned to be. The Primordia of today was a far cry
from whatever plans had been laid for it. Tess ratcheted her craft’s
speed down to barely more than what she could do on foot and it still
felt like every passing second was another risk of clotheslining
herself on a low-swung branch or careening headlong into something
floral, fleshy, and carnivorous. It was so thick that she didn’t
have to worry about things from the outside getting in, at least.
Once or twice some of the nomads who wandered the Waste Belt had
gotten inside to take shelter, sure, and she’d even befriended some
of them last time, but it was no place for people with wanderlust.
They’d come, they’d hide from the weirdness for a little while,
then they’d go back on their ways again. Tess couldn’t blame
them; it took effort navigating through the trees towards the center
of the snarl, and that was because she knew where she was going and
who she would see. It was effort she was barely capable of exerting
herself, and not everyone had a vehicle that could just float over
the worst of the roots and burrows.